Blog

What I did over summer vacation.

I probably haven't written one of these since grade school. Sure, I've been known to publish “The State of Kyle Vanderburg” at the end of the year, but those are generally really long and really boring. This won't be really long.

ACADEMIC
Let's face it, it was summer, I slacked off. I took three hours of classes in July (Development of Tonality), worked on contacting doctoral programs, and started thinking about going paperless for the next academic year.

PERSONAL
I spent a week in Missouri in mid-June visiting friends and family, and a couple of days annoying Amy Seibert in Illinois. I started working as webmaster/designer/social media authority for the Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy at the beginning of June, where I'll probably stay until I leave OU. I spent a lot of time on the top floor of Sarkeys Energy Center, which has some spectacular views. I traveled to Springfield a couple of times for weddings and to annoy the Drury Jazz Camp faculty. My parents visited Norman in early August, and dad and I refinished this chair.

PROFESSIONAL
With no active commissions, I spent the beginning of summer working on a new eleven-minute work for solo piano (I’m waiting for composition-lesson approval before posting it to the catalog, but Jennifer Tripi helped with quite a bit of editing) that is set to premiere in mid-November. I received word earlier this month that my work for flute and piano, Foi dans l'aléatoire is set to be read by the Chicago-based Accessible Contemporary Music sometime next month. I also finally decided to buy a decent electric piano, because the MIDI-Controller-through-computer setup was getting annoying.

Most of the summer was spent doing non-compositional-yet-professional things. I took a serious look at my web presence and branding, and made some significant changes. Due to the way I originally started my publishing company I was stuck with a Missouri business entity (Vandermusik) and a differently-named ASCAP publisher (Vandemalioa). Vandemalioa is completely unpronounceable, unspellable, and largely unmarketable, and so with some business-voodoo I started the new publishing company NoteForge.

Of course, a new company means a new website, and with that in mind I completely rewrote and streamlined all 6600 lines of code that make up the backend of my website system (a ridiculous thing called BLINK). BLINK powers most of the text-based content for KyleVanderburg.net, KyleV.net, and NoteForge.com. I also removed most of the subdomains of KyleVanderburg.net (except listen.kylevanderburg.net), and built and installed some really fun things like the VanDerBurG (VDBG.us) Twitter Application, a Content Delivery Network to speed up page loading times, several system tools through KyleV.Net, The Everything megablog, and the Collabtive project management system. So really, lots of under-the-hood tweaking that involves no noticeable design changes, but speeds up website loading, website updating, and my workflow.

Plans for the fall involve a work for solo flute and other fun and awesome things that I'll announce when things are less busy and more normal. Or vice-versa.

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I apologize for the ridiculous redundancy this will cause…

…but I'm changing the webserver and I'm not sure how many times this will show up.

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Accessible Contemporary Music to schedule “Foi dans l’aletoire” for upcoming reading session.

Happy Friday!

I've just been informed that the Chicago-based Accessible Contemporary Music is scheduling Foi dans l'aletoire for one of their upcoming Weekly Reading sessions. I'll post more information as it is made available.

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